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Wenqiao Zhang

Wenqiao Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AnyMS: Bottom-up Attention Decoupling for Layout-guided and Training-free Multi-subject Customization

Multi-subject customization aims to synthesize multiple user-specified subjects into a coherent image. To address issues such as subjects missing or conflicts, recent works incorporate layout guidance to provide explicit spatial constraints. However, existing methods still struggle to balance three critical objectives: text alignment, subject identity preservation, and layout control, while the reliance on additional training further limits their scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we present AnyMS, a novel training-free framework for layout-guided multi-subject customization. AnyMS leverages three input conditions: text prompt, subject images, and layout constraints, and introduces a bottom-up dual-level attention decoupling mechanism to harmonize their integration during generation. Specifically, global decoupling separates cross-attention between textual and visual conditions to ensure text alignment. Local decoupling confines each subject's attention to its designated area, which prevents subject conflicts and thus guarantees identity preservation and layout control. Moreover, AnyMS employs pre-trained image adapters to extract subject-specific features aligned with the diffusion model, removing the need for subject learning or adapter tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnyMS achieves state-of-the-art performance, supporting complex compositions and scaling to a larger number of subjects.

preprint2026arXiv

CORE: Code-based Inverse Self-Training Framework with Graph Expansion for Virtual Agents

The development of Multimodal Virtual Agents has made significant progress through the integration of Multimodal Large Language Models. However, mainstream training paradigms face key challenges: Behavior Cloning is simple and effective through imitation but suffers from low behavioral diversity, while Reinforcement Learning is capable of discovering novel strategies through exploration but heavily relies on manually designed reward functions. To address the conflict between these two methods, we present CORE, a Code-based Inverse Self-Training Framework with Graph Expansion that bridges imitation and exploration, offering a novel training framework that promotes behavioral diversity while eliminating the reliance on manually reward design. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Code Abstraction to automatically infers reward functions from expert demonstrations without manual design. The inferred reward function, referred to as the Label Function, is executable code that verifies one key step within a task. Building on this, we propose Strategy Graph Expansion to enhance in-domain behavioral diversity, which constructs a multi-path graph called Strategy Graph that captures diverse valid solutions beyond expert demonstrations. Furthermore, we introduce Trajectory-Guided Extrapolation, which enriches out-of-domain behavioral diversity by utilizing both successful and failed trajectories to expand the task space. Experiments on Web and Android platforms demonstrate that CORE significantly improves both overall performance and generalization, highlighting its potential as a robust and generalizable training paradigm for building powerful virtual agents.

preprint2026arXiv

CrossView Suite: Harnessing Cross-view Spatial Intelligence of MLLMs with Dataset, Model and Benchmark

Spatial intelligence requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to move beyond single-view perception and reason consistently about objects, visibility, geometry, and interactions across multiple viewpoints. However, progress in cross-view reasoning remains limited by three major gaps: the scarcity of large-scale well-annotated training data, the lack of comprehensive benchmarks for systematic evaluation, and the absence of explicit alignment mechanisms that establish object-level consistency across views. To address these gaps, we thoroughly develop CrossView Suite across three coordinated components: CrossViewSet, CrossViewBench, and CrossViewer. Firstly, we introduce a multi-agent data engine to meticulously curate a large-scale, high-quality cross-view instruction dataset, termed CrossViewSet, covering 17 fine-grained task types with 1.6M samples. Second, we meticulously create a scene-disjoint CrossViewBench to comprehensively assess the cross-view spatial understanding capability of an MLLM, evaluating it across various aspects. Finally, we propose CrossViewer, a progressive three-stage framework for cross-view spatial reasoning in MLLMs, following a Perception -> Alignment -> Reasoning paradigm. Our method equips an adaptive spatial region tokenizer to capture fine-grained object representations, and then aligns the multi-view objects explicitly, and thus fuses aligned features for boosting the cross-view inference capacity for MLLMs. Extensive experiments and analyses show that large-scale training data, systematic evaluation, and explicit cross-view alignment are all critical for advancing MLLMs from single-view perception toward real-world spatial intelligence. The project page is available at https://github.com/Thinkirin/Crossview-Suite.

preprint2026arXiv

EgoCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Grounded and Verifiable Operation-Centric Chain of Thought Reasoning for MLLMs

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has led to growing interest in egocentric video understanding, specifically the ability for MLLMs to recognize fine-grained hand-object interactions, track object state changes over time, and reason about manipulative processes in dynamic environments from a first-person perspective. However, existing egocentric video benchmarks suffer from \textbf{limited grounded rationale evaluation}, offering limited support for fine-grained operation-centric reasoning and rarely examining whether model rationales are grounded in explicit spatio-temporal evidence. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{EgoCoT-Bench}, a fine-grained egocentric benchmark for grounded and verifiable operation-centric reasoning with explicit step-by-step rationale annotations. Overall, EgoCoT-Bench comprises 3,172 verifiable QA pairs over 351 egocentric videos separated into four task groups for a total of 12 sub-task groups, encompassing perception and retrospection, anticipation, and high-level reasoning. The benchmark is constructed through a spatio-temporal scene graphs (STSG) guided generation framework and is further refined by human annotators to ensure correctness, egocentric relevance and fine-grained quality. Experimental results show continuing difficulties with egocentric fine-grained reasoning and further reveal that many multimodal models produce explanations that are answer-correct, but have evidence that is inconsistent with the answer. We hope EgoCoT-Bench can serve as a useful testbed for grounded and verifiable reasoning in egocentric video understanding. Project page and supplementary materials are available at: https://dstardust.github.io/EgoCoT/.

preprint2026arXiv

Unified Personalized Understanding, Generating and Editing

Unified large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in general-purpose multimodal understanding and generation. However, they still operate under a ``one-size-fits-all&#39;&#39; paradigm and struggle to model user-specific concepts (e.g., generate a photo of \texttt{<maeve>}) in a consistent and controllable manner. Existing personalization methods typically rely on external retrieval, which is inefficient and poorly integrated into unified multimodal pipelines. Recent personalized unified models introduce learnable soft prompts to encode concept information, yet they either couple understanding and generation or depend on complex multi-stage training, leading to cross-task interference and ultimately to fuzzy or misaligned personalized knowledge. We present \textbf{OmniPersona}, an end-to-end personalization framework for unified LMMs that, for the first time, integrates personalized understanding, generation, and image editing within a single architecture. OmniPersona introduces structurally decoupled concept tokens, allocating dedicated subspaces for different tasks to minimize interference, and incorporates an explicit knowledge replay mechanism that propagates personalized attribute knowledge across tasks, enabling consistent personalized behavior. To systematically evaluate unified personalization, we propose \textbf{\texttt{OmniPBench}}, extending the public UnifyBench concept set with personalized editing tasks and cross-task evaluation protocols integrating understanding, generation, and editing. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniPersona delivers competitive and robust performance across diverse personalization tasks. We hope OmniPersona will serve as a strong baseline and spur further research on controllable, unified personalization.

preprint2022arXiv

BoostMIS: Boosting Medical Image Semi-supervised Learning with Adaptive Pseudo Labeling and Informative Active Annotation

In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework named BoostMIS that combines adaptive pseudo labeling and informative active annotation to unleash the potential of medical image SSL models: (1) BoostMIS can adaptively leverage the cluster assumption and consistency regularization of the unlabeled data according to the current learning status. This strategy can adaptively generate one-hot &#34;hard&#34; labels converted from task model predictions for better task model training. (2) For the unselected unlabeled images with low confidence, we introduce an Active learning (AL) algorithm to find the informative samples as the annotation candidates by exploiting virtual adversarial perturbation and model&#39;s density-aware entropy. These informative candidates are subsequently fed into the next training cycle for better SSL label propagation. Notably, the adaptive pseudo-labeling and informative active annotation form a learning closed-loop that are mutually collaborative to boost medical image SSL. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we collected a metastatic epidural spinal cord compression (MESCC) dataset that aims to optimize MESCC diagnosis and classification for improved specialist referral and treatment. We conducted an extensive experimental study of BoostMIS on MESCC and another public dataset COVIDx. The experimental results verify our framework&#39;s effectiveness and generalisability for different medical image datasets with a significant improvement over various state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

BOSS: Bottom-up Cross-modal Semantic Composition with Hybrid Counterfactual Training for Robust Content-based Image Retrieval

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to search for a target image by concurrently comprehending the composition of an example image and a complementary text, which potentially impacts a wide variety of real-world applications, such as internet search and fashion retrieval. In this scenario, the input image serves as an intuitive context and background for the search, while the corresponding language expressly requests new traits on how specific characteristics of the query image should be modified in order to get the intended target image. This task is challenging since it necessitates learning and understanding the composite image-text representation by incorporating cross-granular semantic updates. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel \underline{\textbf{B}}ottom-up cr\underline{\textbf{O}}ss-modal \underline{\textbf{S}}emantic compo\underline{\textbf{S}}ition (\textbf{BOSS}) with Hybrid Counterfactual Training framework, which sheds new light on the CIR task by studying it from two previously overlooked perspectives: \emph{implicitly bottom-up composition of visiolinguistic representation} and \emph{explicitly fine-grained correspondence of query-target construction}. On the one hand, we leverage the implicit interaction and composition of cross-modal embeddings from the bottom local characteristics to the top global semantics, preserving and transforming the visual representation conditioned on language semantics in several continuous steps for effective target image search. On the other hand, we devise a hybrid counterfactual training strategy that can reduce the model&#39;s ambiguity for similar queries.

preprint2022arXiv

Collaborative Intelligence Orchestration: Inconsistency-Based Fusion of Semi-Supervised Learning and Active Learning

While annotating decent amounts of data to satisfy sophisticated learning models can be cost-prohibitive for many real-world applications. Active learning (AL) and semi-supervised learning (SSL) are two effective, but often isolated, means to alleviate the data-hungry problem. Some recent studies explored the potential of combining AL and SSL to better probe the unlabeled data. However, almost all these contemporary SSL-AL works use a simple combination strategy, ignoring SSL and AL&#39;s inherent relation. Further, other methods suffer from high computational costs when dealing with large-scale, high-dimensional datasets. Motivated by the industry practice of labeling data, we propose an innovative Inconsistency-based virtual aDvErsarial Active Learning (IDEAL) algorithm to further investigate SSL-AL&#39;s potential superiority and achieve mutual enhancement of AL and SSL, i.e., SSL propagates label information to unlabeled samples and provides smoothed embeddings for AL, while AL excludes samples with inconsistent predictions and considerable uncertainty for SSL. We estimate unlabeled samples&#39; inconsistency by augmentation strategies of different granularities, including fine-grained continuous perturbation exploration and coarse-grained data transformations. Extensive experiments, in both text and image domains, validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, comparing it against state-of-the-art baselines. Two real-world case studies visualize the practical industrial value of applying and deploying the proposed data sampling algorithm.

preprint2022arXiv

Consensus Graph Representation Learning for Better Grounded Image Captioning

The contemporary visual captioning models frequently hallucinate objects that are not actually in a scene, due to the visual misclassification or over-reliance on priors that resulting in the semantic inconsistency between the visual information and the target lexical words. The most common way is to encourage the captioning model to dynamically link generated object words or phrases to appropriate regions of the image, i.e., the grounded image captioning (GIC). However, GIC utilizes an auxiliary task (grounding objects) that has not solved the key issue of object hallucination, i.e., the semantic inconsistency. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on the issue above - exploiting the semantic coherency between the visual and language modalities. Specifically, we propose the Consensus Rraph Representation Learning framework (CGRL) for GIC that incorporates a consensus representation into the grounded captioning pipeline. The consensus is learned by aligning the visual graph (e.g., scene graph) to the language graph that consider both the nodes and edges in a graph. With the aligned consensus, the captioning model can capture both the correct linguistic characteristics and visual relevance, and then grounding appropriate image regions further. We validate the effectiveness of our model, with a significant decline in object hallucination (-9% CHAIRi) on the Flickr30k Entities dataset. Besides, our CGRL also evaluated by several automatic metrics and human evaluation, the results indicate that the proposed approach can simultaneously improve the performance of image captioning (+2.9 Cider) and grounding (+2.3 F1LOC).

preprint2022arXiv

DeVRF: Fast Deformable Voxel Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes

Modeling dynamic scenes is important for many applications such as virtual reality and telepresence. Despite achieving unprecedented fidelity for novel view synthesis in dynamic scenes, existing methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) suffer from slow convergence (i.e., model training time measured in days). In this paper, we present DeVRF, a novel representation to accelerate learning dynamic radiance fields. The core of DeVRF is to model both the 3D canonical space and 4D deformation field of a dynamic, non-rigid scene with explicit and discrete voxel-based representations. However, it is quite challenging to train such a representation which has a large number of model parameters, often resulting in overfitting issues. To overcome this challenge, we devise a novel static-to-dynamic learning paradigm together with a new data capture setup that is convenient to deploy in practice. This paradigm unlocks efficient learning of deformable radiance fields via utilizing the 3D volumetric canonical space learnt from multi-view static images to ease the learning of 4D voxel deformation field with only few-view dynamic sequences. To further improve the efficiency of our DeVRF and its synthesized novel view&#39;s quality, we conduct thorough explorations and identify a set of strategies. We evaluate DeVRF on both synthetic and real-world dynamic scenes with different types of deformation. Experiments demonstrate that DeVRF achieves two orders of magnitude speedup (100x faster) with on-par high-fidelity results compared to the previous state-of-the-art approaches. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/showlab/DeVRF.

preprint2022arXiv

Dilated Context Integrated Network with Cross-Modal Consensus for Temporal Emotion Localization in Videos

Understanding human emotions is a crucial ability for intelligent robots to provide better human-robot interactions. The existing works are limited to trimmed video-level emotion classification, failing to locate the temporal window corresponding to the emotion. In this paper, we introduce a new task, named Temporal Emotion Localization in videos~(TEL), which aims to detect human emotions and localize their corresponding temporal boundaries in untrimmed videos with aligned subtitles. TEL presents three unique challenges compared to temporal action localization: 1) The emotions have extremely varied temporal dynamics; 2) The emotion cues are embedded in both appearances and complex plots; 3) The fine-grained temporal annotations are complicated and labor-intensive. To address the first two challenges, we propose a novel dilated context integrated network with a coarse-fine two-stream architecture. The coarse stream captures varied temporal dynamics by modeling multi-granularity temporal contexts. The fine stream achieves complex plots understanding by reasoning the dependency between the multi-granularity temporal contexts from the coarse stream and adaptively integrates them into fine-grained video segment features. To address the third challenge, we introduce a cross-modal consensus learning paradigm, which leverages the inherent semantic consensus between the aligned video and subtitle to achieve weakly-supervised learning. We contribute a new testing set with 3,000 manually-annotated temporal boundaries so that future research on the TEL problem can be quantitatively evaluated. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach on temporal emotion localization. The repository of this work is at https://github.com/YYJMJC/Temporal-Emotion-Localization-in-Videos.

preprint2022arXiv

End-to-End Modeling via Information Tree for One-Shot Natural Language Spatial Video Grounding

Natural language spatial video grounding aims to detect the relevant objects in video frames with descriptive sentences as the query. In spite of the great advances, most existing methods rely on dense video frame annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort. To achieve effective grounding under a limited annotation budget, we investigate one-shot video grounding, and learn to ground natural language in all video frames with solely one frame labeled, in an end-to-end manner. One major challenge of end-to-end one-shot video grounding is the existence of videos frames that are either irrelevant to the language query or the labeled frames. Another challenge relates to the limited supervision, which might result in ineffective representation learning. To address these challenges, we designed an end-to-end model via Information Tree for One-Shot video grounding (IT-OS). Its key module, the information tree, can eliminate the interference of irrelevant frames based on branch search and branch cropping techniques. In addition, several self-supervised tasks are proposed based on the information tree to improve the representation learning under insufficient labeling. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

preprint2022arXiv

HERO: HiErarchical spatio-tempoRal reasOning with Contrastive Action Correspondence for End-to-End Video Object Grounding

Video Object Grounding (VOG) is the problem of associating spatial object regions in the video to a descriptive natural language query. This is a challenging vision-language task that necessitates constructing the correct cross-modal correspondence and modeling the appropriate spatio-temporal context of the query video and caption, thereby localizing the specific objects accurately. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel framework called HiErarchical spatio-tempoRal reasOning (HERO) with contrastive action correspondence. We study the VOG task at two aspects that prior works overlooked: (1) Contrastive Action Correspondence-aware Retrieval. Notice that the fine-grained video semantics (e.g., multiple actions) is not totally aligned with the annotated language query (e.g., single action), we first introduce the weakly-supervised contrastive learning that classifies the video as action-consistent and action-independent frames relying on the video-caption action semantic correspondence. Such a design can build the fine-grained cross-modal correspondence for more accurate subsequent VOG. (2) Hierarchical Spatio-temporal Modeling Improvement. While transformer-based VOG models present their potential in sequential modality (i.e., video and caption) modeling, existing evidence also indicates that the transformer suffers from the issue of the insensitive spatio-temporal locality. Motivated by that, we carefully design the hierarchical reasoning layers to decouple fully connected multi-head attention and remove the redundant interfering correlations. Furthermore, our proposed pyramid and shifted alignment mechanisms are effective to improve the cross-modal information utilization of neighborhood spatial regions and temporal frames. We conducted extensive experiments to show our HERO outperforms existing techniques by achieving significant improvement on two benchmark datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

MAGIC: Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe for Diverse and Unpaired Text-based Image Captioning

Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired training data to show the diversity of images&#39; descriptions, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming for TextCap pair annotations with extra texts. Based on the insight mentioned above, we investigate how to generate diverse captions that focus on different image parts using an unpaired training paradigm. We propose the Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe (MAGIC) framework for diverse and unpaired TextCap. This framework can adaptively construct multiple multimodal relational graphs of images and model complex relationships among graphs to represent descriptive diversity. Moreover, a cascaded generative adversarial network is developed from modeled graphs to infer the unpaired caption generation in image-sentence feature alignment and linguistic coherence levels. We validate the effectiveness of MAGIC in generating diverse captions from different relational information items of an image. Experimental results show that MAGIC can generate very promising outcomes without using any image-caption training pairs.